Computing and networking technologies have transformed many important aspects of everyday life. Computers have become a household staple instead of a luxury, educational tool and/or entertainment center, and provide users with a tool to manage and forecast finances, control household operations like heating, cooling, lighting and security, and store records and images in a permanent and reliable medium. Networking technologies like the Internet provide users with virtually unlimited access to remote systems, information and associated applications.
As computing and networking technologies become robust, secure and reliable, more consumers, wholesalers, retailers, entrepreneurs, educational institutions and the like are shifting paradigms and employing the Internet to perform business instead of the traditional means. For example, many businesses and consumers are providing web sites and/or on-line services. For example, today a consumer can access his/her account via the Internet and perform a growing number of available transactions such as balance inquiries, funds transfers and bill payment.
In addition, computing and networking technologies have been integrated within educational systems. Educational institutions as early as elementary school are developing and nurturing computer literate students and encouraging the students to employ the Internet as a research and informational tool. Many students today cannot conceive of a world without the Internet.
Typically, an Internet session includes a user interfacing with a client application (e.g., a web page) to interact with a server that stores information in a database that is accessible to the client application. For example, a stock market web site can provide the user with tools for retrieving stock quotes and purchasing stock. The user can type in a stock symbol and request a stock quote by performing a mouse click to activate a query. The client application queries a database table(s) of stocks and returns a stock quote.
One shortcoming of computing and networking technologies is the limited bandwidth. For example, a user consumes a portion of the available bandwidth, which reduces the bandwidth accessible to other users. As more and more users consume the available bandwidth, system response time and/or performance can diminish. Another shortcoming of computing and networking technologies is the limited available data transfer rates relative to the quantity of data available. For example, requests that retrieve large amounts of data (e.g., distributed across various servers) can be time intensive, which can diminish performance.
The aforementioned shortcomings are compounded by users performing frequent and similar requests. For example, a user desiring current stock quotes may perform frequent similar requests to obtain an updated stock quote. Thus, the user frequently consumes bandwidth and performs queries that retrieve substantially similar information. In addition, other users can concurrently perform requests that retrieve substantially similar information. The user(s) is further limited in that the consistency of the retrieved data cannot be guaranteed because the returned results can become invalid after a subsequent database table change.